How to Navigate Tough Job Markets

Joe Cannon (00:00)
life’s crazy. If it weren’t crazy, would we do it?

You’re never like, damn, I killed it as a parent today. Like that was a perfect game. you’re like, we did it, we did it right, we didn’t lose. We got better today,

Kevin Rice (00:07)
Mm.

Joe Cannon (00:13)
at the end of the day your kid doesn’t really know what you do. And doesn’t care

they want you for you

I’m a dad. It’s just end stop.

Kevin Rice (00:36)
Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. My guest today is Joe Cannon. Joe is the Senior Vice President at Hyperice, where he’s helped scale one of the most exciting brands in recovery, performance, and wellness. He’s helped drive the brand’s growth through major partnerships, activations, and high-profile cultural moments across sports and wellness from the Super Bowl to the Masters and South by Southwest. But what really makes Joe’s story so compelling is not just where he’s ended up, it’s how he got there.

He talks about graduating in a brutal job market, piecing together freelance work, sleeping in his car, and doing whatever it took to get his foot in the door. And now, alongside a fast moving career, he’s also raising two young children and trying to be fully present for the moments that matter most. This is a conversation about hustle and opportunity and fatherhood and perspective.

Kevin Rice (01:25)
Joe, thank you so much for being here.

Joe Cannon (01:27)
Thanks for having me.

Kevin Rice (01:29)
So you are the Senior Vice President of Business Development, Hyperice, which is a company that, as you know, I’m a bit of a fanboy I’ve been using the products for many years and it’s been just amazing to watch this like rocket ship take off. Cause when I think I first got some of the products, it was a smaller organization and now it’s what? 200 million in revenue. So you got a lot going on right now.

So tell us a little bit about business development can encompass a lot of different things. what does your role actually look like? And, where do you think you’re giving the most impact to the company?

Joe Cannon (02:05)
⁓ I’m a weird hybrid and I think in our case business development has been a variety of things and is fairly amorphous in the sense of what we do on a daily basis. So our focus is a lot of new business, bringing on new partners, accounts or otherwise to help whether that’s retail or fitness partners, whether that’s experience creation, whether that’s brand partnerships, influencers.

new structures of how we’re going to work. We’re kind of a little bit of everything for the company. so it could be, I mean, it’s probably more special projects than anything. But the last couple of years has really been a focus on working with partners to bring our tech to events to kind of expand the addressable market. Because if we only show up in…

Kevin Rice (02:53)
Hmm?

Joe Cannon (02:56)
fitness or we only show up in spa hospitality, that’s only going to give us a certain amount of the market. And so we’ve been very fortunate, like the growth of our company is so that.

more more people are interested in wellness and taking care of themselves and taking their healthcare into their own hands. people are being, yeah, and being tired of being in pain, exactly. But so much of it’s, there are very few people unlike you where it’s like we put something online and everyone just buys it. Our stuff’s expensive. You’re a psychopath who just, you’re probably the 1 % of our clients who’s like, that was a cool Instagram ad, I’ll buy that. Whereas it’s Normatech, it’s $1,100.

Kevin Rice (03:10)
Yeah, not just performance athletes, but the everyday person.

I

You

Joe Cannon (03:34)
Black squishy pants actually do like I’ve seen a lot of videos. I’ve seen these on Instagram. my gosh These are amazing. I thought these were only for professional athletes or Ironman triathletes like, know It’s it’s so important that we get people in them So working with partners to create cultural moments whether that’s at Coachella We had a few activations We had like 20 or we had 11 Masters houses that were really for executives at other companies to try the tech and try it after a hard

Kevin Rice (03:37)
Yeah.

Joe Cannon (04:04)
days walk at Augusta so I think there’s just things like that that we’re we want to show up more like we want to show up more as as a culture as a brand pillar of wellness that like this is a great way to activate or experience this

Kevin Rice (04:20)
Yeah,

what’s been like the most exciting or fun event or activation that you’ve done recently?

Joe Cannon (04:27)
Hmm.

I should have like a hundred, I mean we probably did like 350 events last year that were for different partners. I don’t know if I have, oh actually you know what at South by Southwest we worked with

Alley who heads up wellness over there at the Fairmont in Austin and we took over their pool and so we were with AG1 and Kohler and we basically had these wellness mornings that had IV drips and facials and kind of everything before and so I just love that aspect of seeing I think we have over the four days we had like 1400 check-ins for people who were from the conference that were trying the tech and otherwise and so for us that’s like oh yeah we could do this at our event.

at F1 or at the Grammys or at, you know, Milan Fashion Week. And so that’s how we are trying to get the product out there more and become more of that kind of cultural influence on wellness.

Kevin Rice (05:24)
Yeah, that’s great. mean, the wellness industry is exploding, right? Across the board, people are spending less on pretty much everything except for wellness. It feels like Hyperice is very well positioned to just really catch and continue to grow as the wave continues.

Joe Cannon (05:41)
Yeah, I think we’ve been really fortunate and lucky, you know? And like we’ve helped a little bit, but I think we’re really fortunate that you see these partners of ours like Whoop or Oura or some of these huge growth moments like Hyrox and you’re seeing this stuff. Like they’re really pushing the boundaries of wellness, you know? I don’t know. It’s… Every day person. Like the amount of people that were wearing Oura rings two years ago.

Kevin Rice (06:00)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, just getting it out to like the everyday person.

Joe Cannon (06:07)
that are using it for different things whether they’re using it as a tracker for their menstrual cycle whether they’re using it just to track their sleep like you’re seeing just just an incredible amount of people take care of themselves in a different way than they did and so that’s really exciting to us

Kevin Rice (06:23)
Yeah.

Well, let’s rewind a little bit because, I want to get back into a little bit more of your earlier career. because what’s not super obvious from your resume and all the success you’ve had at Hyperice is how shaky the beginning actually was for you

So you graduated from UC Berkeley in 2010. Does that sound right? Yeah, yeah. And job market was kind of brutal at that point. What was your experience post-graduation? Because I think a lot of people are experiencing that today where they do everything right. They graduate from, I mean, you graduated from a top school in the country.

Joe Cannon (06:43)
Go Bears. Yes sir.

Kevin Rice (07:04)
And then all of sudden there’s no opportunities opening up. So what was your experience post-graduation?

Joe Cannon (07:09)
Yeah, the best public university in the history of the universe would be like, the correct way to describe Berkeley. we were just like, you know, it’s in there. It’s also ranked somewhere on the list. There just has to be only one, right? It’s like Lord of the Rings, right? There can only be one. And I graduated in 2010 and…

Kevin Rice (07:15)
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is up there too.

Joe Cannon (07:32)
You know, I feel like we’re kind of like that great lie generation. Where was like you do things right, you work hard, you get a college degree, and you’re going to make more money than your parents. And you’re going to have a job coming out of college. And I was like really fortunate that.

This guy who worked at the Cal Rec Center, guy named Joe Watts was awesome. Joe was like sweet baby Joe. This guy was like 6’5″, was just a character, but he was always trying to do things differently. And he me, it kind of found me, it was like you should be the face of like the Cal.

rec centers caltopia show we’re gonna do this thing so can recruit brand partners and we’ll give you like a marketing internship and he kind of took me under his wing and i was like i was an english major and a rhetoric major so i had two degrees that basically gave me no ability to do really anything other than now i’m tremendous with like chat gpt prompts crush crush chat gpt prompts ⁓ but like he gave me some ideas

on things and really got this thing going around and around marketing and I was doing video hosting or whatever and talking to brands and

He actually helped me get two jobs coming out of college. One was Coca-Cola and it was like a campus marketing representative and they were going to pay me $36,000 a year to live in San Francisco and which I am pretty sure even in 2010 was not a sustainable income to live in and anywhere near San Francisco. And so I did not accept that job and opted to move home and took a job with a startup that did

kind of geo targeting with coupons. So one of the first patents there, this guy was like a really forward thinking guy from Orange County, put this patent out there in like 2006, I want to say. And so I went from campus to campus that he had these partnerships with and dropped in and tried to get students to use digital coupons on their phones. And people were like,

Only 50 % of people had the internet at the time on their phones and like I bought an internet phone in order to work at this company so I could show people my first and only My first and only and no no no these were like barcode scans that were Individual based like a paper coupon that we digitized for these businesses so part of the business was to recruit the business and so much of this was like No one’s gonna use coupons on their phones was the stand

Kevin Rice (09:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, QR codes weren’t even native at that point. Yeah.

Joe Cannon (09:53)
reaction it was always this like disagreement and it was really cool it was going really well and

the guy just kind of decided that he was gonna sit on the patent and wait. And now he’s in litigation with everyone else, because now digital coupons are pretty big, and especially map-based digital coupons based on your location. So 20 years later, he was very, right on his predictions. And so I would assume he’s gonna get paid here pretty shortly, because that was not clear and obvious in 2006 or four, whenever he filed those patents. ⁓

Worked spent the next three months applying to any job I could. I spent about 300 jobs probably. Got like three callbacks, got like one interview, got no jobs. It was like wildly depressing. I remember going to bed early, just being so sad and being like, what did I do wrong? And one of my buddies, my best friend, we started finding these listings on Craigslist for people wanting people to do

Kevin Rice (10:42)
Hmm.

Joe Cannon (10:49)
social media and they weren’t calling it social media because all the social media jobs at this time like Coca-Cola or big companies like Bank of America it’s like we want people to run our Facebook and Twitter and we want them to have 10 years of experience on Facebook like

for a platform that wasn’t out. Like only Tom from MySpace had 10 years and whoever was in charge of LiveJournal had social media experience in 2000, right? And I like, well, how is this even possible? Like, who’s even saying this? And so I think, like not even Peter Pham, the PTTOW legend has 10 years of social media experience in 2010. And I couldn’t get a job. so like all these companies wanted people to run their Facebook and Twitter for them.

Kevin Rice (11:05)
Right.

Joe Cannon (11:31)
I was living in my parents house, sleeping on my buddy’s couch in LA when we wanted to. And then he found this offer, this job at this place called Sports Studio, which was recently purchased by an investment group led by Adam Sandler and Jackie Raputo from Happy Madison. And they did all the fake sports and TV commercial and movies, so wardrobe, casting, choreography, but they were going to add ancillary services and kind

to build out this agency-like business. And so I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. They’ve done a league of their own any given Sunday. Just like incredible projects that I grew up with. Mighty Ducks, just idolizing. And they just had this warehouse with three million garments. It was so cool. And I was blown away. And I was like, have to get a job here. And so they were offering like $10 an hour, 10 hours a week. But was in LA. I had to be out there. And so I would go to…

these meetings and sit there and with them and I got the job and it was it was crazy I would like if I came from my parents house in Chino Hills I would have to I would leave like five because I realized I was taking like two hours to get out to LA and so I get there like at like 5 30 or 6 and then sleep in my car because it took me like 45 minutes then and my boss would knock on the door and wake me up and I was obsessed with it and I couldn’t get enough and

then, but there were no jobs, it was a small company, they weren’t doing a tonne of revenue, and then…

Kevin Rice (12:51)
Were you still like

freelancing jobs on Craigslist at this time?

Joe Cannon (12:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is one of them. But once I got this role full time, I got rid of the other ones. I was like, oh man, I kind of gotta just go all in on this. And so work there.

Kevin Rice (13:06)
Yeah, we both have that

in common. Like that’s how halfway started was I was freelancing jobs. Well, me and my business partner were freelancing jobs off Craigslist. We had just taught ourselves to build websites, basic SEO, kind of like internet marketing stuff. And so we set up auto responders and every time somebody would post a listing for build a website, do SEO, anything like that, we would have an auto response and we just like send them an email and be like, Hey,

I’m a United States based freelancer because they would get hundreds of messages from people in India or overseas. And, I’d be the one that would respond right away with an actual message. And, ⁓ that’s how we got our start. Just freelancing jobs off Craigslist.

Joe Cannon (13:51)
And neither one of us got murdered, which is cool. ⁓

Kevin Rice (13:54)
Yeah. Well,

and I was also desperately poor, barely getting by. ⁓ I don’t even know how I managed to survive. I live in these crappy little places and, was probably eating like top ramen. Cause it was just survival mode, just kind of getting through and just trying to figure things out. Cause yeah, the job market was terrible. I didn’t want to get a traditional job. And I was just like, all right.

and I guess I look back and those years were really formative for me. Cause I think they really developed a lot of my sense of drive and hustle and just, ⁓ part of my identity today is just I’m the person who’s going to find a way. And I think that really came from those early years.

So let me ask you, how do you think that period of your life where you were sleeping on friends’ couches at your parents’ house, just trying to survive, how did that foster who you are today? Or did it play a big role in who you are today?

Joe Cannon (14:49)
Maybe, I think yes, I think absolutely. I mean, I think I have a soft spot for people who are looking at career transitions or don’t fit in the square peg round hole or whatever the saying is, right? cause that’s me and I just, I like know how difficult that period is,

I think I looked back on it and I was like, oh man, I was so depressed. Like, I was really, really, and I probably never said that.

I had applied to so many jobs and like nothing was taking and it was just like, this sucks, you know? And like this really, really sucks.

Kevin Rice (15:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Joe Cannon (15:28)
Maybe I should go to grad school. I had taken the LSAT, which now has expired, unfortunately. My dad would still remind me all the time, like, you know, if this doesn’t work out, you could go to law school. And he still will say that, and, you know, it’s…

Kevin Rice (15:28)
Yeah.

⁓

You could always be a divorce attorney and then

you’d be really depressed.

Joe Cannon (15:45)
Yeah, you could be, you could. There’s lots of, and maybe there’s a lot of happy ones too, but yeah, it was a time, man. It was a time. yeah, I just, think like I’m really grateful for the people who took shots on me and gave me time. And I think I am always like that now too, because even like when we were coming up

Kevin Rice (15:51)
I’ve yet to meet one.

Joe Cannon (16:10)
At sports studio we’re going all these events. We were trying to change our business and there were there were people that like gave us time that I will always and even early at Hyperice and stuff but gave us time that actually treated us better than we were at that time like didn’t make us feel small

And I always just have this soft spot for those people And I’ve had conversations with people in the past about this at big sporting events. Some people are like, you were really close with that guy there. And I’m like, I was just telling him how much I love him and I care about him because he gave us time and treated us like we were someone we weren’t.

when we were trying to be. And like, I don’t know, that kind of stuff is always amazing. And so it’s like, I hope that I do that for other people too.

Kevin Rice (16:50)
Yeah.

Yeah. But I mean, during that time you developed a lot of skills that had you not been working on those, you probably wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity at, sports studio and ultimately wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity at hyperice, right? That was kind of your transition into this world.

Joe Cannon (17:14)
Yeah, sports, sports licensing, sports product content. It was a time.

Kevin Rice (17:20)
Did you, did you get the

job at sports studio off of Craigslist or was that just came in from something else? Yeah, you did. Okay. we had a big break client that came off Craigslist, a company called weed maps.

Joe Cannon (17:25)
Yeah, Craigslist. No,

Kevin Rice (17:34)
so we met their founder because he was freelancing SEO jobs

And so weed maps were spending like a hundred grand a month with us. it was a huge client came from Craigslist and eventually they took everything in house and Justin sold the company for an insane amount of money. uh, but yeah, it just came through a lot of just hustle and a lot of terrible, terrible clients that we had to work with.

Off Craigslist, like just some of the weirdest characters ever. but you know that one thing like brought in revenue helped us grow the company. And in those early days, if you would have come into our office, there’d be like 10 developers with just nothing but like. weed like cannabis on their screens. that’s all we were doing was just cannabis websites. And, when they took everything in house, we had to figure out how to get the, replace the revenue.

Thankfully we signed some big accounts, it was just kind of serendipitous, but ⁓ yeah, like you never know what’s gonna come when you’re out there hustling.

Joe Cannon (18:35)
It’s

Kevin Rice (18:35)
so sports studio, I think you started kind in a small part-time capacity. how did you end up taking a full-time position at sports studio?

Joe Cannon (18:45)
There was an HR incident. I got a call when I was in Berkeley going into the Cal football game and my boss called me at the time and was like, hey, know, something happened at the office and would you like a job? And so I took a job doing wardrobe and was doing…

wardrobe for Hollywood TV commercial and movies ⁓ as well as doing the marketing function, blogging, SEO, PPC, like all that stuff that kind of in our social, kind of cataloging all the projects that this company had done. So when someone searched, they’d find us. They knew we were the industry standard for what they needed. And so…

Yeah, it was, I got a start, a full-time start because someone else messed up.

Kevin Rice (19:36)
You know, preparedness, luck meets luck, there’s that saying.

Joe Cannon (19:40)
Yeah, it’s, yeah, I would

say like, you know, in retrospect was probably like a very interesting beginning, but you know, take what you can get.

Kevin Rice (19:49)
Well, why did

they choose you? Because you were doing part-time.

Joe Cannon (19:53)
I was the only

one working part of time. I think I was like the natural selection for the person. not that they were like, yeah, Joe dresses really well. I really like his basketball shorts he wears into the warehouse.

Kevin Rice (20:00)
Yeah.

What did that role, how did that change the way you were thinking about your career? Cause you graduated with an English degree.

did it make you start to think like, marketing could be a real career for me. what did you learn in that experience at Sports Studio?

Joe Cannon (20:21)
I think sweet baby Joe at at Berkeley kind of turned my mind on to the marketing aspects and like being able to like, okay, cool. Like there’s this really interesting way we can tell this story. But also there was this mechanical aspect of then where it was like Google really didn’t care about the answer.

before AI, they were looking for blogs to give the answer to these questions or Wikipedia. Someone says, where do I rent sports wardrobe in Hollywood? So was like, there was this very mechanical aspect and way to gamify it. And I have a personality that I become obsessed with things where it’s like, I just want to learn.

Kevin Rice (21:01)
like Pokemon cards.

Joe Cannon (21:03)
like I, I have this kind of weird.

memory that I can’t delete a lot of stuff out of the hard drive, so to speak. say that like, I’d weigh a lot less if I could forget a lot of my memories, but I have a solid state hard drive and so this is all actual data storage and a lot of it’s useless, but yeah, just, I have, I just, I genuinely like people and I want to work with people I like and talk to and learn about and learn about them and what they’re into. And then I can get into that. I’m genuinely curious.

about this kind of stuff which I think is a skill in business development and then also just you ask questions like that’s really cool how does that work and like I’m always been willing to be the dumbest person in the room by being like I don’t know what does that mean like that acronym or something we’ll be the military meetings like yeah the this crazy afternoon you’re like and everyone’s nodding question question in the back

What does that mean? And getting the answers and always being the one, I don’t know but I can find out is one of my superpowers and that’s what I love doing and it’s like, I don’t know so could you tell me the answer? So I think that’s something that I really like and enjoy about all of it is I’m just a voracious consumer of content and information and media just to be like.

Oh, that’s cool. That’s interesting. That’s an angle for us. whether it’s fashion or culture or anything I love. Like, I know I’m a dad. I’m not cool. But like, I feel like I have a pretty good sense for someone this aged to like to know that I don’t know what’s cool. So that I should look at other stuff to understand what is so that we can get involved in it

Kevin Rice (22:39)
Yeah. I mean, we’re dads. We’re never going to be cool again. but at least you get to go do some pretty cool stuff with Superbowl and masters and things like that. now that you’re at Hyperice, I, I’d love to hear how did you end up at Hyperice? was that another Craigslist opportunity?

Joe Cannon (22:47)
Doesn’t suck.

No, no, no, no, Craigslist. I’d met Jim, the CEO of Hyperice while he was at a company called Zenith Helmets. And we had done some projects together, with Dick’s Sporting Goods and we actually did like a One Direction.

photo shoot with Jimmy Fallon back in the day, like super early, was like One Direction’s in Drew Brees. We made these uniforms for them and ended up doing it with like a friend who’s still one of our friends actually worked at Hyperice, Alex Reinhardt for a few years running our sports marketing. And we would just have these conversations. We’d go to these dinners for like four hours talking about what their business was doing. And I was just I was so interested in business.

and it still am, I just love business biographies and memoirs and I’m an absolute nerd when it comes to that sort of thing and understanding how and why things work or don’t work. And so we were just talking and ⁓ over the course of months, if not a year after he joined,

I held off, I was working on some cool entertainment projects, But yeah, I was like, do you wanna come and join Hyperice? And I remember talking to my girlfriend at the time, now wife, and I was like, I don’t know, am I rushing it? And it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

And I went and I was like, don’t want to, my fundamental thing was like, I don’t want to miss out on the rocket ship. And it’s been really fun to be.

Kevin Rice (24:15)
Was it obvious to you that it was gonna be a rocket

ship or you were making a bet?

Joe Cannon (24:18)
I think

it had the potential to be. I think the stuff they were doing predominantly with pro teams, like the product was good. But I remember Anthony, prior to joining, they had just launched the foam roller and then the vibrating ball. And at the time, I was kind of unsure on how these things really worked. I wasn’t really involved in fitness or whatnot. so…

It’s kind of unsure on how this stuff worked and if it could sell. so, took kind of a leap of faith, but I knew that I wanted to work at a brand. I knew I wanted to do something cool, stay in sports. That’s been part of my who I am, sports, fashion, and culture. so, yeah. It’s the right fit for me.

Kevin Rice (24:59)
Yeah, well, it sounds like your wife had a little bit of a role to play in helping you make that decision.

Joe Cannon (25:04)
She reminds me of that quite regularly.

Kevin Rice (25:06)
Do you think you would have recognized the opportunity or been willing to make a bet on this organization had you not gone through that kind of struggle period of trying to hustle and figure out job gigs throughout that period? it those years that led you to this or would you have just ended up going down this path anyways?

Joe Cannon (25:31)
think a lot of the relationships that I built, I think the opportunity was great. I had been at other, at sports studio for five and a half years and it was probably time for me to try something new. Like I had built the network to what I could and this was an opportunity to grow it in a bunch of other kind of more consumer focused areas and that’s what we’ve kind of done.

Kevin Rice (25:52)
Yeah. well, it’s an amazing organization. nobody knows it, but I wear a venom back device pretty much for every episode. And, ⁓ you see, I got, I got a few products back here that I added for product placement for you. But as, as you mentioned earlier, I pretty much have the entire catalog. You should probably just do an auto subscription for me whenever a new product is released. Yeah. Yeah. Just for me.

Joe Cannon (25:54)
Thanks.

Wonderful.

We should. That’s just like a one of one of one.

Kevin Rice (26:36)
Also, you have two young kids under the age of five. You’re traveling every time I talk to you, you’re traveling. So you got a lot going on. What’s life like for you right now, both at home and work? Kind of what’s going on behind the scenes?

Joe Cannon (26:51)
Life is, life’s crazy. If it weren’t crazy, would we do it?

yeah, I have a five-year-old who turned five on Christmas Eve and then my daughter…

turns three in ⁓ about a month and a half. And they’re awesome. We love them. But we, my wife and I have our hands full for sure. So things are in the midst of T-ball season and we accidentally signed up for Pony, which is a very intense undertaking as

As we learn, there’s a lot of parents who’ve developed their…

just out of being toddlers into like baseball war machines, is, which is incredible. ⁓ we, were not one of those parents. So we’ve been, ⁓ we’ve been chasing a little bit as the development. when we first went out there, my wife called me from practice cause our daughter had, had vomited right before. So like I was drew the short straw of taking her home to get her cleaned up. And my wife called me and was like, Holy shit, these people are really good at baseball. And she like referred to them as people.

I’m like, aren’t they like five? She’s like, actually some of these kids are like almost seven. I was like, how is this? our son can barely like throw a baseball, has no concept of the rules. And we’re almost at the end of the season and we’re still working on some key fundamentals as in like throwing and not running away from the ball. You know, we’re working through some things, but the coach has been awesome and it’s been really fun, it’s a…

Kevin Rice (27:56)
Yeah.

from the ball.

Joe Cannon (28:20)
where she called me maybe 10 times and it was like, think we might have over signed him up. Like this might be bad. He might be just turned off from sports forever. And he leaves practice, he wants to call me and he’s like, dad, baseball was awesome. And we’re like, oh, okay. Well, if you thought that was awesome, then I think you’ll really like it when you start to learn how to play it. But it’s been really fun to watch that process and you know, not push that along. we got that going.

Kevin Rice (28:48)
My, my nine year old just started baseball for the first time ever. And so he’s never played before, but he’s really confident. He was like, dad, I’m a good baseball player. So, okay, let’s go see how this goes. And, I, I realized I, kind of also over, ⁓ stepped here because baseball is four nights a week. It’s just completely taken over. I thought it’d be like a game, a practice, no big deal, but

Joe Cannon (28:48)
and

Yeah.

Baseball dad,

you’re just like a hashtag baseball dad.

Kevin Rice (29:15)
It’s constant and he, gets two at bats a game, doesn’t touch ball in the outfield, but he’s really enjoying it. So I’m trying to just kind of be encouraging, even though my life just got taken over.

Joe Cannon (29:26)
what I think I like about, even though I quit baseball when I was 12, even though I think it was my best sport, because I thought it was boring. And I played catcher, and my dad was like, if you think baseball’s boring and you’re a catcher you’re involved in almost every play, then I have no argument for baseball. Like, okay, you can go play soccer and do basketball and other things that you were doing. And so my son…

my son really liking it but the difference between that and soccer like at this age the kids get to play in the dugout together there’s more downtime they can goof around a little bit and there’s just this fun kind of camaraderie that exists within it which i really love i you know working with professional athletes like we do at hyperice

and the book Ranged by Epstein, before I had kids, I got really into because it talks about like over-specialization leading to burnout and other things and injuries and otherwise.

Like I think fundamentally sports can be such an amazing teacher of of kids about resilience and friendship and being a good teammate like before Cole goes to baseball every day and before he gets out it’s one of the three rules of baseball and it’s like listen to your coach try your hardest and be a good teammate and like that it goes so far and I think we lack a lot of that now

But I just love the aspect of what team sports can teach you about life and being a good friend and being a good teammate and winning and losing and just coming back. we’re going to put him in everything kind of regardless of whether he wants to or not, just to so he gets a feel for it. And it’s like he gets what it is to suck and skill development and all of those things. I think there’s just so much in sports that like I love. like growing up,

My first toys, we’ve done the reverse with my son. All of my toys growing up were balls. Like I don’t think I had until I started playing sports, got like a GI Joe. Now my parents will disagree with this and be like, we gave you everything. But you see all these pictures of me, there’s a ball. Like that’s pretty much it. It’s like, there’s a hoop, there’s a goal, there’s a bat. Like, it was just always that. And so.

Kevin Rice (31:15)
Mm.

Joe Cannon (31:31)
We kind of have done the reverse with my son where it’s like he really likes art and otherwise. But his interest in sports and his skill development has been really fun to watch.

Kevin Rice (31:39)
think the merits of like kids sports are there. what I’ve been struggling with is just kind of what I mentioned is like, it takes up so much of our family time. And I saw somebody recently who’s a parenting expert talking about how like successful families that raise successful kids, they really preserve a lot of the family time. And so they don’t enroll them in a lot of sports, maybe one sport at a time. And, ⁓

Yeah, I would love to have my son playing a sport where it’s two, nights a week. And the rest of the time, you know, we have family time because it does take away from it. But like you said, you know, you’re learning camaraderie and, and also he gets another kind of mentor type figure that he can learn from. And then there’s also just the school of hard knocks. I didn’t want to come out and tell him when he said, I’m really good at baseball. didn’t want to be like, you’re actually not really very good at all.

I wanted him to be able to experience that himself and come to the realization and then hopefully want to work on it. But as of right now, he’s not interested in really playing. I offered to throw catch with him for the last five nights in a row and he just turned me down every time.

Joe Cannon (32:47)
We started doing, like not bribing,

I mean, I guess this just is full bribery. Like we’re absolutely bribing our son because he really wants to play the infield. He wants to be more involved, but dude can’t catch or throw. So like no, no person should put him in the infield. with any sort of conscience for his safety. and so part of the conversation in the last week has been like, I really want to play more and

Kevin Rice (33:00)
Yeah.

Joe Cannon (33:14)
So it’s like, then we got to practice throwing and catching, buddy, because the guys who are in there, they’re able to get the ball out and do those things. So let’s practice. And really, our goal is for next season to when you’re one of the bigger guys, because he’s the youngest kid in the league, pretty much, because he turned five on Christmas Eve. And so the cutoff is January 1. So it’s it’s born that year, so you’re a 2020 baby, so here you go. And he’s.

Kevin Rice (33:28)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cannon (33:41)
he’s kind of getting that, which is kind of nice. it’s kind of a hard conversation to have with your five year old and like probably one that’s a little bit too soon, but it’s like, hey, all we can do is get better. let’s.

Like we could be a good listener, we can be a good teammate. Like those are the things that you have to be excellent at those let alone the skill development. Cause they’re gonna tell you where to throw it sometimes and you gotta be able to do that. And he’s like, yeah, you’re right. And so he like discouraged, but he’s starting to recognize that like in the difference between him and the other. So I like that aspect and not being the one that it’s like, Hey, you suck. You’re gonna do better.

Kevin Rice (34:06)
Hmm.

Yeah,

yeah, I just don’t want that to have to come from me. I want him to realize it himself and then hopefully he wants to practice, which I haven’t seen materialized yet, but maybe maybe it’ll come soon. So.

Joe Cannon (34:20)
blame it on someone else.

My son’s

super into Pokemon cards right now, which is something like I bought. And so he’s obsessed with my Pokemon cards that I’ve collected and had at my mom’s house. He made me bring them home.

Kevin Rice (34:32)
as all kids are.

Joe Cannon (34:42)
He was like, dad, you don’t even play with the Pokemon cards, you should just give them to me. I like, well that’s a good argument, but I was like, well they’re grandma’s. And he’s like, well even better, just bring them home and I’ll have them. And I’m like, yeah, I don’t think so. I go out to grandma’s every night after you go to bed just to look at them. And my mom lives an hour away from our house. And so a couple days later, he’s like, you don’t drive out to grandma’s every night.

Kevin Rice (35:00)
Yeah.

Joe Cannon (35:04)
to play with the Pokemon cards. So you should bring them here. I was like, okay, fine. So we brought them here, but if he does certain things in baseball, he can pick one of the non-holographic cards, because that dude will tear a Charizard like it’s a napkin, you know? but yeah.

Kevin Rice (35:12)
Mmm.

I made the

mistake of building my son a deck that was too good. I built him this dragon deck with this kind of like unique combo where you do a lot of discarding and then you specifically like pull out this Charizard from your graveyard. And I built him this deck that’s just too good. And now I can’t build a deck that will beat it. And he just beats me every time. Cause the deck is just better than everything else I can make. So that was my mistake.

Joe Cannon (35:44)
It’s like using ChatGPT You’re like, how do I beat the best deck in the history of the world? So.

Kevin Rice (35:47)
How do I beat this deck? ⁓

well, Joe, know, I know you are very like devoted dad.

How do you balance, being there with your son, going to baseball, playing Pokemon with him with a role that requires a lot of you. Cause I also know you travel a lot. You’re always going to conferences.

How do you balance the two and kind of what’s going on with you at Hyperice right now?

Joe Cannon (36:14)
Yeah, I mean, I would say I have an incredible partner in racing and really the CEO of our household. my wife has a full-time job and it does an incredible job still just like making things special for the kids and the family and just has this unbelievable drive to make our kids childhood special. And so.

so many times it’s just trying to keep up with them and I would say like I’ve done a much better job over the last call it like two plus years of being more present my first kid we born like in the middle the pandemic and so like I didn’t even take paternity leave

And I just kind of kept working and took it later and we went on a vacation with him, as the three of us. because I was just around, I was stuck in the house. was like, might as well work. at that point it was, always liken that moment to, you know, like when you’re a newborn dad for the first time, you’re like, Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada.

except there’s two Meryl Streep’s, you know? And you gotta anticipate every need of both and clean up the mess, do the dishes, do this stuff and be there. And so it’s like, that’s your focus. And it’s very tactile and operational, which I do really well. I’m fundamentally like a fixer and someone who goes and can get things done, like see it, fix it, move on, is kind of how I roll. And now as they get older,

I think I’ve done a lot better job of I guess maybe two years ago I kind of had this realization that I was I’m doing all these things and I have this like I love the career that I have and the things we get to do are amazing and I have these pinch me moments that 10 year old me would be like you went to the Super Bowl? What? Or like you know 13 year old me would like you went to the Masters? Are you kidding? and that’s not lost on me but it was like

It wasn’t necessarily feeling as sweet and maybe that’s because I wasn’t taking the time with the kids to really be there. think, I don’t know if you ever feel like a really good parent, I guess. This may be too therapeutic, but I always feel like I’m kind of like Bill Belichick or Nick Saban after a win. Every night we’re laying in bed and

Kevin Rice (38:26)
Hmm.

Joe Cannon (38:36)
You’re never like, damn, I killed it as a parent today. Like that was a perfect game. You’re like Bill Belichick going back, you’re like, we did it, we did it right, we didn’t lose. We got better today,

Kevin Rice (38:40)
Mm.

Joe Cannon (38:47)
but we could have done a lot of other things better. And I feel like that’s part of being a good parent, but you have to kind of give yourself a little bit of grace.

Kevin Rice (38:55)
Yeah.

Joe Cannon (38:55)
just enjoying it. And so right now, I mean, from five to 7.30 PM, it’s pretty impossible to get a hold of me. Cause that’s the time my kids are awake.

And when I’m home, that’s what I’m doing. Now, I’ll check emails or texts or things here and there, throughout the evening. And I’m not saying I’m not on my phone, because a lot of times, that’s my decompression time too. Because after the kids go to bed, 7.30 happens and 7:30 – 8 And then I’m back on ripping emails to Asia or the Middle East or…

catching up on the day’s work and getting stuff out ahead. Because so much of my role is outbound pushes that it kind of like has to be like I am the motor that generates the gas. Otherwise it just doesn’t return in that way. And so I’ve just spent a lot of time being there and trying to appreciate it. mean like, wow, this is like, this is really nice.

We’re getting a breather, we’re taking our time, and I still think sometimes like a daily struggle, right? You finish some days, you’re like, wow, that was really hard. Like right now, bedtime is really hard for us. And sometimes we’re both in there trying to get them down. It’s like, what on earth?

It’s not like we don’t do the same routine every day. So, yeah, it’s definitely a balance and I travel a lot and we have a ⁓ great support system and I think just, my wife also travels for work too, so we go back and forth. So some weeks, it’s all me, some weeks it’s all her. doesn’t travel quite as much as I do, thank God. But yeah, it’ll be

Kevin Rice (40:10)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Cannon (40:32)
be weeks where we’re home, we’re pretty hardcore about it when we’re in it, you know? So I love walking my son to school. That’s a great reset for me every morning when I’m home. All these families in our neighborhood have golf carts and we don’t want that far away. it’s like, to walk and spend the time, right? And he really is into roly-polies. we set a New World record of collecting 13 of them every day, which is a pretty big deal.

Kevin Rice (40:39)
Yeah.

that’s great. I love how you have some rituals, right? starting the day with your son, walking to school, closing out with bedtime routine and kudos to you, man. having a window of two hours where you’re actually present with your kids. That’s really hard to do. I’m constantly talking to people and that’s really their biggest struggle is they have time with family despite working 12, 14 hour days traveling a lot, but

Joe Cannon (41:00)
So.

Kevin Rice (41:24)
The hardest part is to actually just being present in those moments. ⁓ because yeah, you got emails and text messages and you’re just constantly bombarded. like turning on, do not disturb. That’s a great tool.

Joe Cannon (41:38)
Or just like, man, it’s bath time. Sorry. and just being super honest about it, right? Like, ⁓ sorry, T-ball practice, you know? can’t help. And like, my dad always coached my teams growing up. And like, I can’t do that. I know that that’s probably just one step too far for where I am right now and what I do. Where it’s like, I just don’t know how I could do it, right? And it’s because like, you know.

Kevin Rice (41:50)
Yeah.

Yeah, like overextending yourself, yeah.

Joe Cannon (42:04)
It’s like a missed stuff. so, yeah.

Kevin Rice (42:07)
Yeah,

I don’t think I could coach my kids until if they pursued sports to an older age where it was a little bit more competitive. It’s really hard for me to just tone it down enough that I could be a good coach. But if he played middle school, then I feel like that’s that would be my time to really get in there and help him develop his skills. Because I’m a bit of a driver.

Joe Cannon (42:32)
Yeah, I get that.

Kevin Rice (42:34)
Yeah.

how is becoming a dad changed the way that you see yourself?

Joe Cannon (42:39)
I’m a dad. It’s just end stop. That’s the biggest note, right?

fundamentally, it’s like that’s what’s going on in my tombstone. Dad, father, husband, brother, son. It’s not selling stuff or doing cool partnerships. I hope the Normatech ACG boots aren’t on my tombstone.

Kevin Rice (42:48)
Mm-hmm. Father first.

Joe Cannon (43:00)
Like, because that would be sad. Because that would not deal with the impact I made on other people.

Kevin Rice (43:06)
Yeah.

My kids might joke that they would be put in my grave because I wear them too often.

Joe Cannon (43:12)
was wild.

Kevin Rice (43:12)
Yeah, how

did things change for you after you became a parent, in those early years?

Joe Cannon (43:16)
I think it just rationalized how…

how important everything is or isn’t. And like the, we’re kinda only here one time and I think

Kevin Rice (43:22)
Mm.

Joe Cannon (43:28)
at the end of the day your kid doesn’t really know what you do. And like kinda doesn’t care

at like the young age. they don’t, they don’t care about any of it. They don’t care about the sale, they don’t, like they want you for you and.

Like, you know, Ryan Holiday has that story about getting frustrated because everything he builds, the kid stops and then has him build something else or build this castle or whatever in Fort and they just don’t even play with it. And then his wife tells him like, but you’re the toy. Like you’re the toy. It’s not the toy, it’s not the toy, you’re the toy. And I just love that because I’m like constantly reminding myself like, I’m the toy. Like I’m…

like making them great. like, and it sounds so silly when you’re not a parent, like to hear that, like, but it just changed your perspective on, on everything.

Kevin Rice (44:19)
Yeah,

well, a lot of like career is success and accomplishments and what you said a few moments ago about they just want you for you. that’s a really important reminder of what self-esteem really is. in career you get so much external validation rather than just knowing that you’re enough. And then you have this mirror every day when you come home that reminds you this

Little human loves me for exactly who I am, not because we hit our numbers or because we did this big event. and, you know, our kids just really are such a great mirror for us.

Kevin Rice (44:53)
Joe, thank you so much for this conversation and just being here with me today. I really appreciate how honest you were across both sides of the story, like the grind, the clarity that comes later when you realize what really matters. And I just really appreciate your reminder that kids don’t care about our titles, our partnerships, our wins at work. They just want you. And that’s such an important anchor for anyone trying to build a career and a family at the same time. So thank you again so much. I really appreciate you being here.